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Navigating Your Institutional Reporting

We are pleased to provide institutions with their results from the 2011 administration of the CIRP Freshman Survey. As institutions head to the portal (www.cirpsurveys.com) to retrieve their results, it is perhaps wise to provide a quick overview of what can be found in institutional reporting.

CIRP reporting contains a good deal of useful information, and I like to start digging into the data with the Institutional Profile, which contains an institution’s results broken out 4 separate ways: 1) first-time full time freshman, 2) first time part time freshman, 3) transfer students and 4) all respondents. Each of these reports details the frequencies, means, standard deviation, statistical significance (if appropriate) and effect size for the institution and your two comparison groups, broken down by gender. After the Institutional Profiles, there is a Condensed Version of the Institutional Profile. This version is identical to the one we produce for the freshman monograph. Lastly, the Appendix of the Institutional Profile contains a listing of all the participants in the 2011 CIRP Freshman Survey and a copy of the instrument for your records.

The CIRP Constructs are a great way to summarize information about experiences and outcomes we know are important to institutions, but are too complex to be captured by one or two survey items. There are two separate ways to look at the 7 CIRP Constructs on the CIRP Freshman Survey, and both are provided in the Construct Report. First are mean reports which show an institution’s mean on the construct, as well as that of the two comparison groups, along with standard deviation, statistical significance, and effect size, all broken out by gender. Second are percentage reports, which show an institution’s comparative information based on the percentage of students in the high, average, and low group for the construct. You guessed it, the percentage reports also are broken out by gender. It’s two separate looks at the same information, and we encourage you to use the CIRP Construct report that makes the most sense given their culture.

Since CIRP surveys are comprehensive, it can be cumbersome to navigate the waters of the Institutional Profile looking for the items that deal with a specific topic (e.g., Academic Preparation). Theme Reports group like items together for easy access. There are 14 Themes on the Freshman Survey, which we hope suggest ways to think about your data and use it with specific units on campus to understand and enhance the undergraduate experience for incoming students. Theme reports contain summarized frequencies, means, standard deviation, statistical significance, and effect size for the institution and your two comparison groups, again broken out by gender.

Along with the institutional reporting, we know institutions will want to do more sophisticated analysis on their campus to further understand the results. The Datafile contains unit record responses for each respondent. This year, we have included not only those respondents who completed the survey, but also those who started the survey and stopped at some point along the way (“partial” respondents).

New to our institutional reporting this year is the Expected Graduation Rate Calculator. You can learn more about it here, but this calculator has been populated with your 2011 CIRP Freshman Survey results, and allows you to forecast changes in your expected graduation rate by modifying the characteristics of your incoming class.

We will send institutions their copy of “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2011” in January, and look for the national coverage of the release on Thursday January 26, 2011!

We at CIRP trust that institutions find their students’ responses to the survey to be informative and useful for their own assessment and improvement purposes. As always, we are interested in hearing your views on the value of this information and how you are using the results. Please email me at lpblake@ucla.edu to share your good work.

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